Bringing the People Indoors
In the beginning, the American Revolution was about liberty. To the Americans, as to their ideological mentors, the radical English Whigs, liberty was the antithesis and eternal antagonist of power. Power meant simply control over the lives of one’s self and others, and its relation to liberty was reciprocal; any increase in one man’s power implied a decrease in another’s. Personal liberty, as the influential Whig Thomas Gordon put it in 1722, was the minimal power over one’s self given to every person by natural law, “the Power which every Man has over his own Actions, and his Right to enjoy the Fruit of his Labour, Art, and Industry.” The political or civil liberty of the people as a whole, accordingly, was the sum of every individual’s personal liberty, the power to control the actions and destiny of all the people, and when the two came into conflict, civil liberty, the expression of the people’s will, would supersede personal liberty. Civil liberty was manifested in the institutions of “free government,” which necessarily meant democracy, or government by the people themselves. Civil liberty, the Boston revolutionary Benjamin Church told his audience in 1773, is “the happiness of living under laws of our own making [and] is exactly proportioned to the share the body of the people have in the legislature,” and where it existed at all, it was always threatened by despots seeking power for themselves. (Wood [1969] 1998, 1825, 60–65, quotations from Gordon and Church at 21, 24; Bailyn [1967] 2017, 55–61.)
Civil liberty was the inspiration of the English Whigs and the goal of the American revolutionaries. Both embraced the potential of England’s “mixed government,” which had evolved to balance the powers of the Crown, the nobility and the people at large in the government, empowering each of the three estates to protect its interests against the others, so that when the balance was properly maintained, it became an effective guardian of the people’s civil liberty. But as the eighteenth century wore on, both the Whigs and the revolutionaries also came to see English government as deeply corrupted by the Crown’s systematic attempt to unbalance it and to increase its own power by seducing members of Parliament with offers of lucrative sinecures and persuading them to support measures that placed important administrative functions beyond Parliament’s control. This corruption was abetted, they thought, by a general deterioration of the social fabric induced by the wealth and luxury conspicuously enjoyed by the governing elites, putting the British Empire on a procession, as one American orator declaimed in 1775, “in fatal round, from virtuous industry and valour, to wealth and conquest; next to luxury, then to foul corruption and bloated morals; and last of all, to sloth, anarchy, slavery and political death.” Like the Whigs, Americans felt increasingly estranged from the life of cosmopolitan London and alienated from its governing institutions and saw the people’s liberty as gravely threatened by the passing of power from a tolerably representative Parliament to the Crown’s administrative machinery. The Whigs, English as they were and thought themselves to be, sought to win their civil liberty through reform rather than revolution. But Americans throughout the colonies were
